49 pages • 1 hour read
David Henry HwangYellow Face
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Awards
Awards represent DHH’s need for recognition, status, and confirmation of his identity. The play parodies DHH’s reliance on awards to signify his achievements and enhance his reputation as a respected Asian American artist. DHH earns a Tony Award for Best Play, the Visionary Warrior Award from the Asian American Artists Association, and the Justice in Action Award from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The more DHH compromises his integrity and maintains Marcus’s false ethnic identity, the more he craves the public’s acceptance. In a late-night drunken call to attorney Margaret Fung, DHH pleads, “Do you think I’m still an Asian American role model?” and then asks if her organization can honor him with another award (34). In many ways, DHH’s reliance on his image as a role model is similar to Marcus’s appropriation of Asian identity. Marcus explains that he keeps up with his false identity “Cuz it feels good. To be part of something–bigger than myself” (64). Both DHH and Marcus desire to keep the truth hidden so they can enjoy praise and inclusion.
The prevalence of awards also signifies the ways that Asian American identity is “performed.” At the Visionary Warrior Award ceremony, DHH becomes competitive with Marcus when the latter earns the “Most Promising Newcomer Warrior” Award. Instead of valuing the ceremony for its support of Asian American artists, DHH treats the honor as a popularity contest. He yells at Marcus, “I was an Asian American role model back when you were still a Caucasian!” (43). The irony of the scene is that Marcus, a white man, has performed the identity of an Asian American better than DHH has. The scene also pokes fun at how DHH and the awarding organization recycle his image as an Asian American trailblazer. DHH, whose recent play was a flop and who has taken a job working at his father’s bank, can still earn an award for being an Asian American maverick in the arts.
Dong Folk Songs
During Marcus’s initial visit to China, the Dong people and their folk songs symbolize the purity and authenticity of Chinese culture. The Dong village, home to the ethnic minority of the Chinese highlands, is a remote location that signifies a culture that has remained unchanged since time immemorial and is removed from outside influences. Marcus’s desire to discover the “soul of China” relies on orientalist notions of China’s exoticism and romantic primitivism. He contrasts the mountain terraces of rice fields with Shanghai’s futuristic cityscape and believes the Dong village is a pure and authentic representation of the heart of China.
Scenes in the Chinese village bookend the play, with an emphasis on the role of song in the community. In the beginning, Marcus is impressed by what the villagers call their “big song,” a polyphonic piece that is sung communally. As the play progresses, the significance of the music and the Dong people changes. Marcus learns that the government pays the villagers to sing the song for tourists. He begins to feel like his experience in the village is inauthentic as he notices satellite dishes in the landscape and fishermen using cell phones. At the play’s end, Marcus learns that his experience in the village is authentic precisely because of the things he reads as inauthentic. Satellite dishes, cell phones, and the tourist economy reflect the realities of contemporary Dong life. The futuristic cityscape of Shanghai is also authentic because China is not a monolith. When Marcus hears the villagers’ “big song” again with this awareness, he understands that the song is made up of many voices and that nothing is pure.
The Press
Similar to the awards shows, DHH’s sense of identity and self-worth is also constructed around attention from the press. DHH’s relationship with the press is one of antagonism and dependence. He values the press when he is celebrated, yet despises them when they malign him, his father, and the Asian American community as a whole. DHH inherited his obsession with the press from his father, who keeps a collection of clippings that mention his son’s name, even if it is negative coverage. DHH criticizes his father’s habit, but he is obsessed with his public image. He makes decisions based on whether they will make him look good rather than whether they are right. Although he makes an impassioned speech against yellowface during the Tony Awards and writes a letter of protest against the yellowface casting of Miss Saigon, DHH is unwilling to stand behind his words when they begin to jeopardize his public image. When he experiences backlash against his letter to Actors’ Equity, he tells Carla Chang, “it’s my name out there. My face in the papers” (13), and steps away from the protest. The scene suggests that DHH values the opinions of white celebrities more than those of the Asian American community.
In Act II, DHH takes a more critical view of the press when his father is attacked in the newspapers and suspected of aiding China through illegal finances. DHH confronts the reporter behind several anti-Chinese articles, arguing, “you arrange the facts, decide what’s important and what’s not—until you find a story that makes sense to your mind” (62). DHH realizes that he cannot choose how the public views him, but he can make a difference in representation through his plays and his own public stance in the press. At the end of the play, DHH goes public with his involvement in faking Marcus’s ethnicity and risks his reputation to help expose the racial bias in the government’s investigation of Asian Americans. He also finds some comfort in the press after his father’s death: “My father’s obituary was picked up by the wire services, and ran in over two hundred and fifty media outlets, from Mississippi to Taiwan. I thought he would’ve liked that” (67). Even though HYH’s name was dragged through the press while he was alive, DHH finds humor in his father’s optimistic logic that at least the coverage meant he was a notable person.
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